Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun

By Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden

Melville House 2024

Great stories sometimes crawl out of dark, unseen alleyways; events festering in the bylanes of intellectual history which, in the hands of capable storytellers, are excised from the farrago of the past and transmogrified into narrative jewels reflecting the pathos and hopes of an age. Such an ambitious undertaking is Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun, by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden (a collaboration that began at the London School of Economics), a new book taking an inquiry into John Calhoun's scientific career as ethologist and behavioral researcher in postwar America as the kernel around which a tapestry of relevant issues is woven, as far ranging as a rise in violence and civic unrest due to urban population growth in the 1960s to the emergence of overcrowding as a deleterious factor in prisons and psychiatric facilities.

"At the personal level, being crowded together was unpleasant. At the societal level, it was potentially disastrous." Such are the concerns motivating a motley cast of city planners, architects, behavioral researchers, and prison reformers, all of whom were influenced by and in turn casted their own shadows on Calhoun's work of studying overcrowding in rodents, beginning "in the 1940s...[in] a clearing in the woods behind his house" to "the 1970s, [where] his rats were living in large, elaborate enclosures within the animal houses of the National Institute of Mental Health." The book details Calhoun's multiple research cycles creating and then observing "universes" where his rats and mice created socially complex empires and led relatively normal lives, having all their needs fulfilled except that of personal space. Eventually these devolved into rodent dystopias, where the inmates descended into "untrammeled violence and sexual behavior" or coped by "[withdrawing] into asociality and asexuality."

These "behavioral sinks" ultimately leeched any social skills from the subjects and led to the development of intergenerational trauma which left them physically healthy yet unable to reproduce, leading to inevitable extinction. The appropriation of Calhoun's research by other thinkers dealing with the phenomenon of environmental effects on social cohesion and the mental well-being of humans, is the parallel narrative informing the context around Calhoun's increasingly ambitious experiments, where "much of the appeal ... lay in its topicality; as wide-scale slum clearances were relocating communities into high-density high-rises, and against a backdrop of rising crime and civil unrest, Calhoun’s experiments were a good fit with the widespread pessimism about the future of the city." In these pages, John Calhoun emerges as a visionary researcher working hard to emerge from the confines of a strict disciplinary identity:

an ecologist whose professional habitat is the city, a naturalist more interested in simulated environments than field studies. Fascinated by sociality, he is horrified by crowds.

The book handles both these stories with exhilarating grace and narrative coherency, never indulging itself in tedious digressions or dense scientific jargon. Whether it be an aside while describing the biological phenomenon of homeostasis, where an organism adjusts to maintain an even keel ("Even in war, the body would—for as long it was able—maintain a pretense of normality, as if to conceal from the soul its own distress") or an observation into the psychology of people lacking territorial possessions and resembling caged prisoners ("The self-inflicted vandalism of public housing was a prison riot in slow motion"), the authors are up to the task of adding little grace notes and psychological insights to augment the power and readability of their thrilling subject.

The condition of extreme social withdrawal in humans, defined as hikikomori by the Japanese, was already highlighted in the preface of the book, and some of Calhoun's later research notes on his rodents are balefully presaging this relatively modern problem:

"..the frustrated, rebuffed younger males begin to avoid their older associates, and participation in courtship activities with females declines, then disappears." Rejected first from possession of property, and latterly excluded from reproductive activity, they began to huddle in listless pools at the center of the pen ... In Calhoun’s terms, they had “ceased trying to acquire a normal social role.” Although these mice were still physically present, and relatively healthy, they played no part in the social life of the universe: “Socially speaking, they had removed themselves from the universe, they had psychologically emigrated.”

Rat City is a jolt of frisson that can't help but configure itself into a mental landscape looking forward to unmitigated population densities in a century threatened by mass human migrations in the wake of climate collapse and political unrest; a spark illuminating potentialities in the shadowy maze of our future.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi